


Hometown Glory

by darlingargents



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Horror, Journalist Mike Hanlon, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:35:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27183227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingargents/pseuds/darlingargents
Summary: In summer 2016, Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Mike Hanlon decides to investigate the long history of violence and death in a small town in Maine.Or, Mike doesn't stay behind.
Relationships: Bill Denbrough & Mike Hanlon & Ben Hanscom & Eddie Kaspbrak & Beverly Marsh & Richie Tozier, Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon
Comments: 6
Kudos: 35
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	Hometown Glory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hearthouses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearthouses/gifts).



> Not tagging because it's pretty minor, but there's also background Richie/Eddie and Ben/Beverly.

Mike slept through the announcement of his first Pulitzer. He’d written a piece on the devastation multinational corporations have wreaked on mom-and-pops, and in the month of buzz leading up the winner announcement, he’d been on the Pacific Crest Trail, exploring murder spots. There was a serial killer who had targeted dozens of young men on the trail and the surrounding towns, and it had gotten little to no media focus. He’d been poring over crime scene photos: the beauty of the Pacific Northwest disrupted by pieces of corpses nailed to trees and sprays of arterial blood across cedar bark.

Two nights before the announcement, he’d finally made it home and collapsed into his bed. The day before, he’d started to put together his piece on the PCT killer (the vague descriptions of  _ snake-like _ , the stretched smile like a mask of skin across his jawbone, the impossible but repeated descriptions of eyes glowing gold in the dark) and hadn’t bothered to check his email. Too overwhelming.

So, he’d missed it. All the fanfare. There was no one to call him, anyway. No parents to be excited. His grandparents had died five years ago, three months apart. He doesn’t have any close friends. All of his relationships have fallen apart within a year.

He has his Pulitzer. The goal that he’s been working towards, on some level, since he decided to be an investigative journalist, since he’d moved to Seattle for the incredible job offer at the Washington Post. And somehow, he feels almost nothing.

That night, his boss and coworkers take him out for a drink, and he gets slightly tipsy and goes home and stares at the ceiling instead of sleeping.

Something in the back of his skull itches.

His piece on the PCT killer, a year later, doesn’t get quite as much critical acclaim. He’s fine with that. It’s a piece that leaves more questions than answers. He doesn’t name any of his suspects, because most of his suspicions are based on intuition and suspicious timing. One of them, the one that his gut tells him is the real killer, is nobody, and probably should’ve been disqualified based on timing alone. A construction worker who moved from Maine to Oregon six months after the murders started, who posts on social media about hiking on a regular basis. Mike has spent far too long on his instagram, scrolling through mountain selfies and workout tips, trying to see if he looks  _ snake-like _ , if his eyes might glow in the dark.

Anyway. It’s not his best piece. He’s moving on.

He’s bouncing between a few ideas. But there’s one in particular that keeps catching his attention. It’s not much, mostly a hunch and a bit of a lead. His summary is just a few words:  _ what happened to Bill Denbrough’s brother? _

It doesn’t seem like it would be much. But for some reason, he keeps going back to it. Staring. Below the summary are a few smaller notes, dates and references.  _ (1988? Pictures — none. Derry ME) _

He’s been thinking about the town.

One night, after a few drinks and a call from his editor asking politely to choose his next piece by next week ( _ extremely _ politely; it turns out when you’re this critically acclaimed, your job is mostly up to you) Mike pulls up his laptop and googles it.

The first couple of pages about it are just ordinary things — a Wikipedia page, the Maine state website’s tourism page for the town, a few results about Londonderry in Ireland. For some reason, he keeps clicking through pages, not even sure why. It’s not even interesting.

Until it is.

It’s a blog post from the mid-2000s, and the blog itself shows its age with flashing sidebars and a neon background pattern. The blog title at the top of the screen reads  _ MUSINGS OF A LOVER OF KILLINGS _ , which Mike finds somewhat questionable, but he pushes past it.

The post is titled “Derry, Maine: the Deadliest Town that Americans have Not Even Heard Of?!?!?!?” Not a great start. It’s neon green text on a black background, and Mike copies the blog post onto a word processor just to read it. When he finally can, it’s almost an overload of information.

Crime statistics. Deaths and disappearances of adults: not just unusually high for a town of that size. Astronomically high. High enough that Mike’s investigative brain is already planning ways to verify it. But it seems true, and as he reads further, he feels himself growing colder and colder, somewhere in his stomach.

Child disappearances. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them. Lists of children: names, ages, date of disappearance, how old they’d be now. Just the disappearances are such a long list that they take multiple pages on his word processor to scroll through, and it’s only from the fifties onwards, when the records start being available. And then the deaths. The cases where a body was found. There’s less of them, but the horrible details stand out.  _ Recoil-free hammer. Blunt force trauma. Missing limbs. Missing eyes. Suicide pacts. _

When Mike gets to the end of the post, he simply sits in shock for a long moment. Not much can shock him now. He’s been a journalist long enough that even the goriest details get filed away to be used or discarded. Sure, he has images and descriptions that haunt him when he can’t sleep, but those are mostly from early on in his career.

This isn’t any worse, by description, but the scale of it is beyond anything he’s ever seen. It’s not the work of a single killer, clearly — the cases go back to the 1800s and earlier, and some of the recorded deaths have a killer behind bars, a family member or friend or jealous enemy — it’s an entire town. Infected with something evil.

A laugh echoes through Mike’s ears, and he jumps, looking around. He’s alone in his apartment, his desk the usual mess, too many lamps on throughout the room. Normal.

The back of his neck is crawling.

Mike closes his eyes and breathes for ten seconds, and then opens a new folder.  _ Derry _ . He adds a link to the blog post to his text file, gives it a date, and saves it to the new folder. Before he closes it, he pauses, and searches for a name. Denbrough.

There it is, listed among the others: Georgie Denbrough, eight years old, vanished in 1988.

Mike closes the file.

He navigates back to the webpage, and his head pounds at the same rate as the flashing gifs on the sidebar. He goes back to google.

He starts to really, truly look.

Mike stays up almost all night. The more he looks, the more he finds, and he’s already scribbled out notes on paper, connections between some of the disappearances and murders. The timing, too: the peaks every 27 years, the one massive violent event that caps off each year of frenetic violence and death and disappearance. And Bill Denbrough. He keeps coming back to him. The disappeared little brother than Denbrough has never once mentioned. As five in the morning inches closer and the summer sun starts to peek into his apartment, he opens a new tab and googles  _ Bill Denbrough recurring themes brothers. _

According to Bill Denbrough’s wiki, younger brothers dying or vanishing happens in almost a third of his books. It’s not actually important to this research — Denbrough might be a public figure, but he’s obviously entitled to not talk about such a painful memory — but for some reason it strikes Mike as a little odd. He’s never mentioned Derry, either. Not once.

Right before Mike passes out, he puts about half of Denbrough’s back catalogue on hold at the local library. He has some reading to do.

Mike spends almost every waking moment of the next two weeks reading through Denbrough’s body of work. He’s heard of them before, of course, because these books top the bestseller list almost every year and he usually pays some level of attention to that, but he’s never really considered himself a horror fan. (Which might be ridiculous, considering the kinds of things he chooses to investigate.) Now that he’s actually reading them, he can’t say he regrets waiting this long.

They’re good, but they scare him like almost nothing else he’s ever read. The descriptions of the mundanity of evil, the bullying, the small towns full of hate and fear. He starts to have nightmares and waking up without remembering anything but the heart-pounding terror. But he keeps reading, because when he’s reading them, he feels like he understands Derry.

He feels like he understands himself.

The endings are still terrible, though. At this point, he thinks Denbrough needs an editor.

When he finally gets through all of them, he goes back to his research with fresh new eyes. Even before spending two weeks doing it, Mike had been sure it was a ridiculous waste of time, but he actually finds it helpful in an almost eerie way. As he starts to research individual disappearances and deaths, he can tie almost all of them to something in one of the books he just read. It brings the connections forward. It helps Mike start to understand and unravel this massive web of violence and misery.

It doesn’t offer an explanation, but maybe there isn’t a simple one. At least not one that Mike can find from the internet.

After a month or two of burying himself in research, Mike has the right questions. That’s all his job boils down to, really: finding the right questions to get the right answers. He has a meeting with his editor, who is impressed with his idea and the research so far, and easily agrees to fly Mike out to Derry for two weeks.

At the end of the meeting, Mike brings up Bill Denbrough. “He was born there,” Mike says, and his editor looks at him, a little surprised. “And his brother disappeared in the eighties. Cold case.”

“Might be a bit of a sore memory for him,” his editor says. Which isn’t a no.

“He also would know the town, though. I’ve read some of his books.” Mike isn’t going to mention just how many, or why he chose to read them in the first place. “I feel like he might have some insight.”

His editor just looks at him for a moment. Mike isn’t sure he quite understands the expression on his face, but it unnerves him just a bit. It gets under his skin.

“Wouldn’t you have some insight, too?”

Mike closes his eyes, and he’s standing in front of his apartment door, the key in his hand.

He remembers nothing. He must have left the office, found his car, driven home, parked, and come upstairs. But he doesn’t remember a single moment of it.

The meeting went well. He has his ticket. That’s what matters.

The day of his flight, Mike’s alarm doesn’t go off.

It’s an early flight, and when he finally blinks awake, it’s past the time he should’ve left his apartment. He runs around his house in a panic and calls a cab instead of parking at the airport like he planned to, and gets past security and into the lounge just as they start boarding. It’s the closest he’s ever been to missing a flight.

His mouth tastes like sleep, his bag is only half packed, and he doesn’t understand. His alarm has never failed to go off before. Not ever.

Outside the plane windows in Seattle, the early September weather is welcoming. When he touches down in Bangor, it’s not even close. It’s sheeting rain, the wind so strong that it’s practically raining sideways. By the time Mike makes it to the car rental area, he’s soaked through. The only reason he’s not worried about his laptop is the waterproof shell on his backpack and his frequent cloud uploads.

“Welcome to Maine,” says the car rental attendant, a young man barely out of his teens, with braces and a visible slouch. “Ever been before?”

“No,” Mike says, and when he glances outside the garage, he almost thinks he sees a figure standing in the middle of the airport traffic, overly-long limbs and a red smile. He blinks and it’s gone.

“Enjoy your stay, mister,” the man says, handing him the keys. Mike looks down at the keys in his hand. They almost don’t look real. His head is starting to pound. In the distance, thunder cracks.

“Thanks.”

Mike has to pull over four times on the drive to Derry. He gets aural migraines and pulls over to throw up, or something stops working in the car and he needs to fix it best he can. The rain keeps coming down, more thunder cracking in the distance, half a second after each lightning flash. The storm is right on top of him.

When he’s finally getting close, the Welcome to Derry sign coming into focus through the storm, he guns it. As he crosses the line, a fork of lightning hits the road right in front of him, the thunder boom so loud that his ears pop and then scream.

Mike swerves, the car coming perilously close to hitting the fence and crashing down to the Barrens below. The flash has blinded him; he fumbles for the gearstick and shifts into park, and presses his hands over his face, shaking. His ears are ringing. His head still hurts like an axe has split it in half. When he finally manages to open his eyes and see something other than blotches of light, he can see a blackened, smoking hole in the middle of the road.

_ This town wants you dead, Mike Hanlon. _

The voice is in his head, but it doesn’t sound like his voice. It’s colder and meaner and feels like his back is being peeled open to expose his spine.

Mike breathes, and the storm slowly, slowly starts to fade, and he drives over the Kissing Bridge and into Derry proper.

This town might want him dead, but he won’t let it take him.

The memories start to creep in as the town unfolds around him.

It’s a short drive from the town limit to the Town House, and Mike starts to recognize things. Buildings, trees, the particular shape of a piece of road. He knows, before he sees, the names of roads. He thinks back to the Barrens and the Kissing Bridge, the names that had popped up in his head. He hadn’t even questioned them.

He’s sweating through his polo shirt. The storm has died almost completely already, the sun out and shining weakly down on the rain-dampened streets. Mike has been here before.

_ Welcome home, Mike _ , a voice in the back of his mind taunts, and Mike bangs his hand down on the steering wheel, too hard. His head is spinning.

When he pulls into the parking lot of the Town House, he pulls out his phone with fumbling hands. He googles Derry and clicks on the Wikipedia page, and scrolls to the bottom.

_ Notable public figures from Derry: _

_ Bill Denbrough (author) _

_ Ben Hanscom (architect) _

_ Beverly Marsh (fashion designer, Rogan-Marsh) _

_ Richie Tozier (comedian and voice actor) _

_ Mike Hanlon (investigative journalist) _

His hands are still shaking as he clicks his own name. His Wikipedia page is short, mostly an outline of his notable works and prizes. In the section on his personal life, there it is.

_ Born in Derry, Maine. _

There’s a source for it, too. Mike clicks it, and the link takes a long time to load. Slowly, bar by bar, a picture appears.

It’s a picture of a group of kids from the late eighties or early nineties. They’re outside in a forest somewhere, caught mid-laugh, posed around a tree. A couple of them on the ground, a couple leaning against the tree, one skinny kid in glasses hanging off a tree limb, his legs flailing in all directions.

Mike recognizes himself in the picture, even with no context. He’s one of the kids on the ground, along with a red-haired girl, grinning up at the boy hanging from the tree. He can’t remember the last time he looked or felt that happy.

He’s only sure of a couple of things, now. First, that he came from here, and forgot. Second, that something wants him to stay away. Badly.

He has to figure out what it is.

Once he’s settled into his room in the Town House, he sets up his laptop, connects to the ancient wifi system, and googles Bill Denbrough. Bill was one of the kids in the picture, he’s sure of it.

On Bill’s website, there’s no immediate contact information — unsurprising, considering how famous he is on the scale of authors. Mike finds his agent and checks for contact info there. The agent has an email address, and Mike shoots off a quick, professional email, saying he’s looking into a case and he would like to speak to Bill as quickly as possible. He’s not sure if he comes across as urgent yet polite or entirely unhinged. It’s possible this town makes it hard to know.

After that’s sent, he decides to go for a walk, to clear the cobwebs out of his head. There’s a festival in town, and as he walks down the street, he sees balloons and beaver hats and  **I ♡ DERRY** merchandise everywhere.

And missing children posters.

He doesn’t notice them immediately, but when he sees one pinned to the wall of an abandoned building, he stops. The bottom corner is fluttering, and as he peels it back, another one is unearthed. Different child. Vanished a week or two before that.

The list of names pops into his head again. Scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, full of questions and nothing else.. It was stupid not to, but he didn’t actually check any of the current disappearances, and that website stopped updating in 2008.

Mike does some quick mental math. The last big wave was in 1989, which means — 2016.

Twenty-seven years.

He’s fallen right in the middle of it.

Suddenly frantic, Mike pulls and pulls on the posters, ripping through the paper. At the bottom, there’s a poster without a child on it.

**WELCOME HOME, LOSERS**

Mike stumbles back, the posters dropping from his hands.

_ Loser, loser, loser’s club— _

_ Losers stick together— _

_ If it comes back, we come back too. Promise. _

Broken coke-bottle against his palm, a promise that none of them knew how to keep. The best friends he ever had, all their faces gone now, except for that one picture.

Mike has to find them.

He goes to the library, because nowhere makes him feel safer than a library. He feels a bit numb as he asks for the yearbook section. The library feels too familiar and entirely distant at once.

He tracks down the graduating class of 1993, and starts to flip through, not entirely sure what he’s looking for until he finds it. His own face smiling out of the page, a little blurb about getting into a university in Florida.

Another name on the same page catches his eye, too. Ben Hanscom. From the Wikipedia article, and from his memory, too.

Suddenly frantic, Mike flips through the seniors pages, and starts at the beginning.

Bill Denbrough. The author, all right, and one of the kids in the picture. Eddie Kaspbrak. Not from the article, but he’s familiar in a way Mike doesn’t understand. Beverly Marsh. Richie Tozier. At the end, one other kid catches his eye. Stanley Uris.

He writes down all their names in a list, and when he looks at them, he feels something almost unspeakably profound. The lucky seven. The best friends he’s ever had… and he needs to bring them here, now.

They’re running out of time.

By the time Mike gets back to the Town House, he thinks the town — or whatever it is that’s haunting it — is okay with him being here. Or at least has decided to let it play out. He sees too many balloons out of the corners of his eyes, and keeps thinking he sees people dressed up like clowns.

When he gets back to his room and opens the door, he has to bite down a scream.

It’s covered in blood.

The walls, the floor, the bed. Not a person or wound in sight. Just blood, dripping off the boring art on the walls, soaking into the curtains. He makes his way in, breathing past the stink of gore, and opens up his laptop. His fingers stick to the keys, but it’s still working.

He has an email back from Denbrough’s agent, with a number to call. He dials, and stands by the window as he does, looking at the parking lot so he doesn’t have to look at the blood.

Denbrough picks up on the second ring.

“Mike Hanlon?” he says.

“How did you know?” Mike asks weakly.

“Seattle area ringtone. I know about you — I read your article on the PCT killer.”

“You’re about the only one.”

Bill laughs warmly, and Mike feels like he’s home, for a moment. He remembers a boy on a bike, riding the back of the bike with him, a storyteller like no one else. “Look, I think… I don’t know why, but I think we know each other.”

“Yeah,” Mike says. “Yeah, I think so too.”

Bill remembers about as much as he did. Which is to say: almost none. When Mike tells him he was born in Derry, he goes silent for so long Mike almost thinks he hung up, until he says, “It’s… it’s on my Wikipedia page. And my author page. I don’t… I didn’t even know that.”

Mike didn’t, either. He didn’t think to check his blurb. Maybe it’s there, too. Everyone around him knows, and he doesn’t.

“We need to find the others,” Bill says when Mike has filled him in on what little he knows. “You’re there now — I’ll get on a plane. Can you track them down?”

“Sure.” It’s his job. It won’t be hard. “I don’t… I don’t know what we need to do.”

“We need to kill it,” Bill says, and his words chill Mike to the core. It’s true. They need to find and kill it, whatever It might be.

“I’ll see you soon,” Mike says, and hangs up.

When he turns around, the blood is gone.

A few drops cling to the ceiling lamp, but nowhere else. Mind games.

Goddamn. Mike rubs his forehead and sits back down at the desk, opening Google.

Time to find the others.

They all react similarly to Bill. They don’t remember much. Mike doesn’t, either, but with each call, he remembers a little more. When he talks to Bev, he remembers a redheaded girl with keys around her neck and a smile that could light up the sun. When he talks to Richie, he sees a boy with glasses who could talk faster than most people could think, with scrapes on his knees and a filthy mouth that was still kind. Eddie, with his inhaler and safety concerns and bravery. Ben, quiet and soft-spoken, who built a clubhouse for them. Stan, who was always more afraid, who held them together.

By the time he’s done, he remembers more of his childhood than he has for decades. He still doesn’t remember what was hunting them, and he doesn’t know how to kill it.

He has to figure it out.

Two days later, around a table in a Chinese restaurant, an empty chair staring them all in the face, Mike has an idea.

Hopefully, it will be enough.

“Why did you come back?” Richie asks, when he finally tells them why they’re there. “Why did you stay when you figured it out? You could’ve fucking run, man.”

Mike has been asking himself the same question since he picked up the phone to call Bill. “I don’t know,” he says. “But I think we killed it the first time.”

“The clown,” Beverly says, pale as a ghost. Her hand shakes around her beer, and she puts it down.

The clown.

Mike didn’t quite remember that.

A pair of chopsticks clatters out of Eddie’s hand to the table, and he picks them up again, quickly.

“I think I know what we can do,” Mike says. “The first time… we stopped being afraid, right?” That’s all he remembers. That they were together, that they faced it and they weren’t afraid. “We made it small. If we aren’t afraid, I don’t think it can hurt us.”

“You don’t  _ think _ ? You’re betting on that?” Eddie asks. “Great, man, we’re all going to fucking die.”

“No,” Mike says. “No, we have to kill it. We’re going to kill it.”

He’s never been more sure of anything in his life.

(He has to be.)

In the hotel that night, they all agree to stay, even after the fortune cookie debacle. Somehow. He doesn’t know how he did it, but he’ll take it. Maybe getting information out of primary sources for all these years has given him experience.

Bill knocks on the door of his room around midnight, and Mike lets him in.

“Do you remember?” Bill asks, urgent. Mike has no idea what he’s asking.

“I don’t—” Mike starts, and Bill kisses him.

_ Oh. _

Mike  _ does _ remember, now. Just flashes. A hand in his, his own hand against a hip, steadying. Watching the stars in the fields. Desperately kissing in the woods, hoping against hope that no one would find them.

He remembers leaving. Different colleges on different coasts. A promise to call.

Neither of them kept the promise.

“I remember,” Mike says, and Bill kisses him again. And again. And again.

Mike closes his eyes and tries to forget everything else except the warmth of Bill’s mouth on him and the safety in holding each other.

The clown finds them as soon as they descend into the earth, towards Its lair. It pulls Beverly under the water, stabs Eddie in the arm with a sharp tentacle, but they still make it down to its home. Where It has been sleeping.

“Don’t be afraid,” Mike calls out as it grows and grows and grows.

“How the fuck am I supposed to do that?” Richie screams back at him.

Mike grabs Bill’s hand, and smiles. And then he realizes that It is planning something.

“Hold on to each other—”

Mike opens his eyes in a fire.

He’s in a burning room, but he can feel no pain. He walks through the flames, and they pass harmlessly through his body.

“Oh, Mikey,” a voice croons from all around him. “You looked for answers all your life, but you can’t find the answer to this one, can you? Your life is a mystery and you’ll never be able to solve it, no matter how hard you try.”

“Go away.” Mike tries the door handle. Nothing. He thinks he recognizes this place. The apartment he grew up in. Which means his parents are here, too.

He hasn’t thought about their deaths in decades, either. It aches to remember that.

“You’ll never be able to escape your failure, Mike—”

“What failure? I was a child.”

“You didn’t save them!”

It hurts, but it doesn’t make much sense. Somewhere, off in the distance, he hears a shout of Georgie!

“Bill!” he shouts, and hears his voice echo far beyond the room. The clown lets out a shriek of rage.

“Bill, I’m coming—”

“You’ll die just like your worthless parents did—”

“Bill!” he screams, and the fire starts to go out, the room filling with smoke. It fills his lungs and he chokes, coughing into his hands, falling to his knees. “Bill, come on, I know you can find me!”

A hand stretches through the ceiling, dripping like it’s emerging from a pool, and the clown screams again as Mike reaches up, up, and his fingers brush Bill’s—

He lands on the floor of the cavern next to Bill, their hands still grasping each other.

“We did it,” he says, awed, and Bill kisses him, fast and desperate. Bill is soaking wet, like he was in a pool of water. He resolves to ask about it later, and gets to his feet.

“Let’s kill it.”

Somehow, they kill it.

Beverly is covered in blood, somehow, and Eddie and Richie both look shell-shocked. Mike isn’t sure what they went through, but as soon as It dies, the cavern starts to collapse, and they have to run. Eddie barely missed a full impalement near the end, a sharp arm going through his shoulder, and it takes him, Ben, and Richie to help support Eddie’s way out as he curls his arm into his chest and breathes fast and frantically. The Neibolt house collapses moments after they stumble out onto the street, and Ben calls an ambulance as Richie uses his leather jacket as a pillow for Eddie as he rests against the ground. The wound on his arm is massive, and Mike is a little bit terrified they’ll have to amputate. That he did this, by calling Eddie here.

He killed Stan by bringing them here, too.

It is dead though. Maybe — hopefully — it can be worth it, somehow.

They can’t save Eddie’s arm, but they can save Eddie, and that’s more than enough.

After the surgery (and a full twelve hours of sleep at the town house, and all of them showering) they pile into Eddie’s hospital room, each of them carrying flowers. Mike is holding Bill’s hand. He doesn’t think he ever wants to stop.

They all lay down their flowers and offer their best wishes, one by one. Bev kisses Eddie’s cheek, and when Richie goes up to him last, they all hold their breath. Richie had had a little bit of a meltdown watching Eddie being taken away in the ambulance.

“I got these flowers for your mom,” Richie says, his voice cracking, “but she didn’t want them.”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, and reaches up with his good hand to pull Richie down into a kiss.

Bev wolf-whistles, and they all laugh a little as the kiss goes on and on and on a little longer.

“Get a room,” Ben says, and Richie flips him off without detaching his face from Eddie’s.

“Let them have it,” Bev says, laughing.

When Eddie finally pulls away, he’s brick-red and smiling.

“I need a divorce,” he announces.

“Oh, god,” Bill mutters, and Mike laughs.

Mike still has two weeks in Derry, but he thinks he has enough material to start his piece. So he does, that night, in bed with Bill. Bill is reading the latest Steven Crain book and cursing under his breath, and it’s so endearing that Mike has to stop and kiss him a few times before Bill tells him to get back to work.

Finally, he thinks he has his opening.

_ Derry, Maine is, by all appearances, a perfectly normal town. _

_ Appearances are deceiving. And I know, because I lived there. _

He doesn’t have answers for the public, but he might have enough for a compelling mystery. And that’s all he needs, really.


End file.
